Freda's computer is her mother's old Dell XPS M-170 gaming laptop. (This is identical to the Inspiron 9300 but with glowing blue bits on the lid.) It's still a pretty damn sweet piece of kit and we frequently remind her that she is the luckiest little girl ever to grow up in a house of computing machinery.

Given her fondness for advertising-filled Flash game sites of dubious provenance, I'd rather it wasn't running Windows. So I put Xubuntu on it. This works perfectly, including sound (SigmaTel C Major Audio) ... but controlling the sound is proving problematic.

There are three speakers: two tweeters in stereo at the front and a woofer in mono. In Windows, these all work together. (You can't change the balance per-speaker, but at least they all go.) In Xubuntu, the sound control panel lets me put sound out either the treble speakers or the bass one, not both at once.

Does anyone know of a sound control panel for GNOME or XFCE that actually lets me switch on and balance all speakers at once, as I wish?

alsamixer and alsamixergui don't seem to afford the ability to control what I need to. alsamixer seems to show both speakers separately, but sound isn't being routed to both, only one.

This suggests PulseAudio is being excessively clever. The sound control is pavucontrol, which is the usual tool for Pulse control. Apparently there is a better controller called paman, but this doesn't appear to actually control anything. And the system crashed (as in, spontaneously rebooted) when I tried changing volume with it.

You may have to dick around with asound.conf or whatever it's called -- it sounds a lot to me like the audio controller is presenting it as two separate outputs, and you'll need to somehow tell ALSA to treat them as one.

(Sorry, no clue how to actually *do* that beyond 'look at asound.conf')